The United Nations condemned the destruction and the International Criminal Court suggested it could be a war crime...

Uh, um...ehh. *sigh*

Considering the ICC makes an Entmoot look brief and succinct, those buildings are doomed. They'll all be rubble before the ICC can even establish its committee to elect a board of supervisors to establish an exploratory committee to consider the question, "Is this a war crime?" But first they'll need to settle the question of whether Timbuktu residents are or are not orcs.

This is the fault of the Saudis and the severe & iconoclastic (even by Islamic standards) Wahhabi Islam that they gleefully export.

The Saudis are so weird they wanted to get rid of the Kaaba in Mecca. They were stopped only because the rest of the ummah went positively apeshit when they heard about it. If anything new gets dug up by archaeologists in Arabia, the government immediately bulldozes it so that the new find doesn't become an object of idolatry.

Timbuktu has been in Muslim hands for hundreds of years now, and only now do Muslims come through who decide it has to be purged of "idolatry".

They did the same thing in China during the cultural revolution. Bonfire of the Buddhas. The entire ancient city of Beijing disappeared, starting with the walls. The Protestant Reformation did stuff like this too.

I was accepted in the Peace Corps to work a project in Mali. I would have been in and near Timbuktu. I turned it down and chose a Vista project.

I studied this country quite a bit back in the 70's prior to my briefing. Timbuktu is a very historic city for Muslims and others. Just last week I had a nice conversation w/ a cab driver from Togo. He was Christian but lamented what's going on in nearby Mali.

Actually as much fun as it would be to blame the Protestants for iconoclastic violence, they were mere pikers at it historically.

Ah, but the French & Russian Revolutions! Those boys were the masters of artistic destruction!

It's not something the left likes to talk about because it's all those troglyditic Christianists who are anti-art, donchaknow, and it's embarrassing for them to admit it's in their DNA from their inception.

You want to have a blood boiling experience? Visit what's left of the monolithic church of St. Emilion in St. Emilion, France.

The Christian missionaries who spread out over much of the Third World in the 19th and early 20th Centuries may have been callous to the richness of local cultures, but I suspect few of them were as destructive as Muslim fanatics routinely are.

There has been a push in recent years to return antiquities to their countries of origin. The counter-argument is that we stole 'em / bought 'em fair and square, so they ain't coming back. Another argument is that is that if they're returned, the locals will destroy them and no one will see them again, such as the Babayam Buddha, recent events in Egypt, Iraq, and not Timbuktu. I say let diversity rein - and we'll keep those antiquities to preserve them from your destructive impulses.

Actually, it is to the work of those 19th & 20th century missionaries that we owe a great deal of our linguistic knowledge of tribal languages, since they felt they had to quickly learn the language to preach & more importantly to translate the Bible into the local language.

Also, while the Spanish may have trashed a lot of the Aztec empire, but it's thanks to a Spanish priest that we have masterpieces like the Mayan Popol Vuh.

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"But the first European to cross to Timbuktu was the Scottish explorer Alexander Gordon Laing, who set out from Tripoli in July 1825 at the behest of the UK colonial secretary. He arrived over a year later, in August 1826, broke, sick, and without a right hand, which he'd lost in one of many skirmishes with marauding Tuareg. He settling into this house, where he planed to remain only three days before continuing on, but ended up staying 38, on the final of which he was murdered."

Islamic radicals are not conservatives. They are a revolutionary, modernizing, nationalist movement. In this they are much like the Communists and appeal to the same kinds of people. They destroy the old in the name of replacing it with something that never existed before. Claiming that they are inspired by the past doesn't mean it's true.

So why is it that Progressives see the same world I do, but somehow they deduce that the world moves inexorably forward, that Progress is inevitable, when in fact history, as here repeatedly demonstrates otherwise?

The 20th Century was replete with this sort of shit, degraded and destroyed cultures and humans. But Progressives saw Progress.

Conservatives see the Same Old Shit, where maintaining progress needs constant effort.

Luke Lea said... They did the same thing in China during the cultural revolution. Bonfire of the Buddhas. The entire ancient city of Beijing disappeared, starting with the walls. The Protestant Reformation did stuff like this too.

They look like the kind of buildings that have to be kept up every year.

They showed the outside of a mud building that looked like something in Taos except not the right color mud. A Taos kiln with structural sticks poking out of it. Said it housed 13,000 or summat but it looked like 12,995 would be standing outside waiting to get in. The ornate doors didn't look all that ornate. No interior shots at all. I'm not impressed with the loss. I am completely ignorant about the first aspect this culture and I don't care about that either.

If it were a Smithsonian article it would be the last thing read after all the advertisements which are actually interesting sometimes, sometimes something different in there, and then I'd go, "good, another Smithsonian all the way through." And the pictures of the mud building would slip into memory of all the other mud buildings that melted.

Timbuktu is a UN Heritage site, and home to hundreds of thousands of irreplaceable manuscripts from back when Islam led the world in knowledge and enlightenment.

Too bad the UN is caught up in fashionable anti-Americanism and can't be bothered to send in some Peacekeepers to protect the historic sites and manuscripts. Of course the UN Peacekeeping force didn't exactly shine in Serbrenica, did it now.

The islam of "hundreds of thousands of irreplaceable manuscripts from back when Islam led the world in knowledge and enlightenment" was populated by Christians who had been forcibly converted by the barbarian Muslims and who were bilingual or trilingual. The Arabs and Turks were interested only in practical subjects so most of the Greek literature was lost.

When the secular Turkish government decided to make Hagia Sophia a tourist museum, they began removing 500 year old panels with Arabic calligraphy and found that the mosaics beneath them had been carefully preserved by the converted Christian workmen who expected Constantinople to be recovered by the Byzantines.

I wonder if the increasingly Islamist AKP party in Turkey will stay the course or destroy the mosaics.

How about the various "graven image" monuments/mausoleums of Attaturk himself? The're all over the place. Of course there is a 1951 law that prohibits any "disrespect" of the Man or memorials to him, but when has something like that ever stopped religious zelots of any kind? Prime target might be the mountainside carving of his bust still under construction after all these years at Buca, a suburb of Izmir on the Agean sea. When I was in the USAF and we staged out of Incirlik Ab (Adana) we noted the place on our charts (for to take the tourista pics while doing an airborne fly-by) "Atta-boy Attaturk!" LOL.

This is an example of an old religious idea, akin to the biblical admonition to pluck out your eye if it leads you into sin. Westerners don't put much store in those old religious ideas any more, to the point where an Abraham who took his only son up a moutain and prepared to sacrifice him because the Voice of God told him to do so, would be locked up as criminally insane. (Every year or so, you can read exactly that story in the NYPost, writing about some Santeria-besotted family in the Bronx taking the biblical Abraham-Isaac story a bit too literally.) Religious devotion has a hard time accommodating compromise; the Voice of God does not take 'no' for an answer. It's a reflection of how little sway religion has on Westerners today that this story strikes us as shocking.

Oh, they've destroyed much more. But if shameful is the only word you can think of to describe what islam does and will do to you or anyone else that gets in it's way then you are already lost. See the evil for what it is. Find a way to destroy that evil and be rid of it. Islam is a cancer on the world and it must be removed as a religion and as a political movement. But you will have to go through its meat-wall of leftists who will defend it first as human shields.

I just checked in to see how many posts it would take before I'm mentioned.

Six (I've still "got" it,...)

For the record, I've laid into Islamists as I have Mormons, and it got me just as much traction.

Sorry, but most of you want to point and call those other beliefs weird, while hanging onto or supporting whatever nonsense you hold dear. I, on the other hand, see you ALL as nutjobs - a whole PLANET of Rielle Hunter's, Tom Cruise's, Oral Roberts', Mitt Romney's, Steve Jobs', and other assorted fruitcakes, thinking you're making *perfect sense* as you point out someone ELSE is talking out of their ass.

Since I view religion as outdated, this is tragic - I'm not for destroying history - though I have to give those Islamist boneheads credit:

When it comes to eliminating superstition, they're doing the best they can with what little they (mentally) have - and even that's more than the average American has attempted.

To re-cap:

The Allah Kings attacked a shrine of some end-of-the-world types, and the people about to elect a follower of Joseph Fucking Smith as their leader find them strange.

Come on.

You're all a bunch of moronic dingbats who reveal too much of the whites of your eyes in conversation.

Fanatics, one and all,...

BTW - heard an interesting discussion on NPR today - pay attention to the section on attempts at being "happy," and the role of Self-Help books on society, and my criticisms might start making more sense to you morons,...

People could never figure if Carter was pro or ana phylaxis. He was against contraception, but very pro-peanut. He fought against the axis of boll weevil as a young man, but ended up a promulgator of the anaphyaxis of peanut evil, though he opposed the lustful evils brought on by the peanuts.

My mother-in-law's live-in caregiver is a former nun from Burkina Faso. The first time she left Ougadouga to visit France she had to make the trek to Timbuktu because that's the nearest international airport.

She married a Desert Storm vet a few months ago and asked me to suggest a video he might like for his birthday. I asked her if she'd ever seen The Gods Must Be Crazy. She wasn't sure. She wanted to know what it was about. I told her it's about a Coke bottle that falls out of an airplane. She started laughing. It was the first video she saw after joining the Carmelites. The movie is nearly as old as she is. Last weekend he took her to see Alice Cooper perform in Milwaukee.

"You don't really believe that humans set out to 'destroy the world.'"

No, Penny, I don't believe humans set out to destroy the world, (or, more accurately, human society). However, in our vanity, our greed and gluttony, our blindness, our short-sighted pathological focus on selfish aims, our obliviousness to the consequences of our actions, that could be the end result.

By the way, of course I'd be happy to help with the dishes if I were invited for Thanksgiving.

and the next statement - "We are also against your devil based 'internal medicine' and also the tool of the devil the 'ak-47' as it was created by foreign devils. From now on we will be killing each other with rocks! ALLLLLLLLLah Akbar!"

Michael K claims I have "the religion of rejecting religion," when I clearly stated above I only see it as outdated. Which means A) he can't read, or B) he's such a fanatic, against any criticism of religion, he just makes shit up. Awaiting Gaia's punishment, indeed.

bagoh,

No election season with a cultist on the ballot can "be a bad time" for me. I was right about Obama, I will be right about Romney - I know cults and cultists. It is the rest of you who are engaged in the silliest of groupthink, and have lost perspective, otherwise you wouldn't be supporting either of them.

As The Stones said, time is on MY side,…

Palladian,

How does one lose perspective when one never had any?

No, atheism isn't a perspective, but being gay is the all-important one I should hear about constantly? Look, tell me all about it after you get off your knees and wipe your mouth,…

Crack wrote:The Allah Kings attacked a shrine of some end-of-the-world types, and the people about to elect a follower of Joseph Fucking Smith as their leader find them strange.

Nope. I don't find them strange, I find them murderous and barbarous. Ultimately, I could give two craps where you (collective you, not you Crack Emcee) think we come from as a race. Nothing, not even evolution has a sufficient answer for all of those questions about how we got here. So strange is not the word. Romney might have some weird views on the man in the sky, but you know what, so has almost every other president we've ever had (don't remember too many atheist presidents) and yet they've functioned as leaders.Is Romney advocating destruction of ancient temples as part of his religion and moral basis? no? Then because they share a similarity in believeing in false idols and poppycock(in your view) isn't really an apt comparison at all.

crack wrote: I know cults and cultists. It is the rest of you who are engaged in the silliest of groupthink, and have lost perspective, otherwise you wouldn't be supporting either of them.

It's not like there's a third choice on who's to be president. BUt is Romney's cultism anything but an incidental to his campaign? How would it impact on your life. Is Obama' leftism incidental to his campaign? How will it impact on your life? I can deal with a Mormon having strange views on god, I can deal less well with 4 more years of non economic recovery and an expansion of the lefty agenda. So if you must, choose the lesser of two evils. If you, because of your hatred of cults, can distingusih between an evil that is an abstraction at best, and which will not impact on your life in any way, versus one where it will directly impact your bottom line, then god help you

I am not just stupid, but also wrong. And squishy! Also, I guess, scarey dangerous. And a stalker! Also--alternatively--entirely ill-educated or overly educated. And not in any way like any sort of average American in any way, shape or form, as viewed from any (or at least the other) side!

It's going to take a few more terrorist massacres, probably include a nuke strike on the USA, for us to realize that the Islamic death cult must be eradicated. I figure we destroy all their holy cities, execute all the leaders, and put the rank and file into reservations.

"Ha! Well, we killed their leader, and a bunch of civilians, and laid waste to the fairly advanced society there.

Aside from that, where's the 'win?'"

Well, let's see. We no longer have to station troops in Saudi Arabia to safeguard the world's oil. Saddam isn't going to threaten his neighbors again, nor will he again attempt to obtain weapons of mass destruction. Baathism, as a political movement was largely crushed. No need for no fly zones and we no longer have to protect the Kurds. Iraqi society, unleashed from autocratic restraints, is modernizing by leaps and bounds. They have a chance at an improved form of representative government. The corrupt UN oil for food program has been rendered moot.

All at an historically modest cost, as such things go. Yep, a win.

Sure, it might all go for nought. And the Germans might once again dominate Europe, despite the drubbing we gave them a while back.

For this, my daughter will be studying Anthropology in the fall. To learn of and save the memory of the things that extremists would want us to lose forever. And also because if you don't really know what they think, you will never be able to convince them to change their minds.

And, yes, the Bible says, "If your eye offends you, pluck it out." But a) I believe it leaves the option turning your head and looking some other way and b) you are supposed to get rid of YOUR OWN EYE, not the object that it's looking yet. I can only allow G-d to change ME. Some other idol will come along for folks who want one.